Time is optimal for publication of comprehensive
encyclopedia

How do airlines devise efficient schedules for routing
airplanes between hundreds of destinations?

Christodoulos Floudas and his
Encyclopedia of Optimization

How do computer networks find the optimal path for torrents
of data?

How do financial strategists arrange investment
portfolios for the best balance between risks and gains?

The problems are diverse, but the solutions are related.
They each benefit from a set of mathematical techniques
collectively known as optimization. With roots extending
back to the work of ancient mathematicians, optimization has
grown in the last 50 years into an important field of
research with experts in many areas of industry and
academics.

Until now, however, there has been no central resource
for trading knowledge between the many specialties, which is
why Professor of Chemical Engineering Christodoulos Floudas
thought it was time to create a comprehensive
encyclopedia.

'Heroic effort'

After six years of work, Floudas and co-editor Panos
Pardalos of the University of Florida have completed the
Encyclopedia of Optimization, which was published recently
by Kluwer Academic Publishers. With five volumes plus an
index, the encyclopedia includes 500 articles by more than
400 authors in fields from astronomy to computer science to
biology.

"It is a treasure house of information," said Ramon
Moore, a professor of computer science emeritus at Ohio
State University whose work shaped the field in the 1960s.
Moore called the encyclopedia a "heroic effort" for pulling
together such wide-ranging material from so many
authors.

"There is no doubt that the Encyclopedia of Optimization
will become the standard and most important reference in
this very dynamic research field," said Dingzhu Du of the
University of Minnesota. "It is a great tool for forming and
validating initial ideas, browsing and brainstorming."

For Floudas, who uses optimization to address fundamental
problems in chemical engineering and biology, the project
was an education not only about the broader field but also
the challenges of orchestrating such a large work.

"There were many instances when I thought, 'We have spent
all this time and made all this effort, but maybe it won't
substantiate,'" said Floudas.

"It is a very rich field," he said. "We had to work a lot
in the first year just to identify subjects and to identify
the potential authors." Help in that regard came from a
29-member advisory board that he and Pardalos recruited for
the project.

The next challenge was corralling the authors into
actually completing and submitting their assigned articles,
which took from 1997 to 1999. In the end, Floudas counts
himself fortunate to have finished no more than a year
behind the originally projected date. "We had to be very
well organized," he said.

Quick overview

The encyclopedia contains three kinds of articles: broad
explanations of general topics; technical articles on
specific techniques and applications; and short biographies
of important figures in the history of optimization. A key
goal, said Floudas, is to allow researchers encountering the
subject for the first time, either as students or as
established researchers in other fields, to obtain a quick
and useful overview. "We want to provide a smooth
transition," he said.

Floudas contributed his own article on a technique called
global optimization, which he has been using to study the
structure of protein molecules. For decades, biologists have
been trying to understand the process by which newly minted
protein molecules, which start as long, straight chains,
fold themselves into intricate three-dimensional shapes.
Floudas uses optimization techniques to predict the final
shape that requires the least energy during the folding
process for any protein.

Now that the encyclopedia is finished, Floudas is
relieved to return full time to his own research, but he
knows it is only a temporary reprieve. "When you create an
encyclopedia it is a never-ending effort," he said, noting
that there will always be a need for new volumes as the
field progresses.

"It is a dynamic and changing field," he said. "That is
what keeps it interesting."

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